With the explosive growth in mobile devices, wireless data rates and mobile-based software applications, the security and privacy needs of the user of wireless devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, and wireless LAN-equipped netbooks, laptop portable computers or voice-over-IP phones with nomadic capabilities.
In the rush to establish gain market share, device manufacturers modified existing operating systems (e.g. UNIX, LINUX, Microsoft Windows, POSIX, NeXT, BSD) and added hardware subsystems and sensors (e.g. cameras, accelerometers, GPS receivers, infrared transceivers, Wi-Fi transceivers, Bluetooth transceivers, and digital signal processors) without due consideration to the unique security and privacy situation of a device as private and personal as a wireless device.
The ‘user plane’ approach implemented in wireless device allows a mobile device to communicate over wireless data backhaul (e.g. cellular, wireless LAN) with networked landside servers. The user-plane approach favors use of device-based and device-assisted location techniques such as use of satellite broadcasts (e.g. Global Positioning System (GPS), Galieo, GLONASS) for precise positioning and infrastructure-based techniques such as cell-id (a proximity location based on the detection of base station, access point beacons, or television broadcast from known transmitters at known transmission sites) or enhanced cell ID (location based on the detection of base station, access point beacons, or television broadcast from known transmitters at known transmission sites with known timing or broadcast power levels allowing for time and/or power-based ranging).
If multiple beacons can be detected, a radio fingerprinting approach, based on the powers of the received signals and either propagation models or uploaded calibration data, can be used for coarse localization.
The cellular base stations are also known as Base Transceiver Sites (BTS), Radio Base Stations (RBS), NodeB's (NB) and eNodeB's (eNB) depending on the radio technology or the manufacturer of the base station(s). The term Access Point (AP) includes wireless local area network (W-LAN) technologies and protocols such as IEEE 802.11, 802.16 and Bluetooth.
The inventive techniques and concepts described herein apply to operating systems such as, and including; Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian, PalmOS, Firefox OS and Ubuntu Mobile/Ubuntu for phones. The Android-based model discussed is an exemplary but not exclusive environment in which the present invention may be used.